You should now have a site up and running locally. Once you have customized it to your liking, it's time to publish it. Docusaurus generates a static HTML website that is ready to be served by your favorite web server or online hosting solution.
Building Static HTML Pages #
To create a static build of your website, run the script:
npm run build
or
yarn run build
This will generate .html files from all of your docs and other pages included in pages. The build folder is inside Docusaurus's directory inside node_modules.
Hosting Static HTML Pages #
At this point, you can grab all of the files inside the node_modules/docusaurus/build folder and copy them over to your favorite web server's "html" directory. For example, both Apache and nginx serve content from /var/www/html by default. You'll still need to host the web server somewhere, and as it happens, choosing a web hosting provider is out of scope for this guide. Don't fret, as Docusaurus was designed to work really well with one of the most popular hosting solutions for open source projects: GitHub Pages.
Using GitHub Pages #
Deploying your Docusaurus site to GitHub Pages is straightforward if you are already using GitHub to host your project. Your code repository does not even need to be public. Most of the work is done for you automatically through the publish-gh-pages script.
Before you go ahead and do that, you need to determine the values for a few parameters required by the script. They are:
CIRCLE_PROJECT_REPONAME: The name of the GitHub repository for your project. For example, Docusaurus is hosted at https://github.com/facebookexperimental/docusaurus, so our repo name in this case would be "docusaurus". CIRCLE_PROJECT_USERNAME: The GitHub user or organization that owns the repository. In the case of Docusaurus, that would be the "facebookexperimental" GitHub organization.GITHUB_USERNAME: The username for a GitHub account that has commit access to this repo. For your own repositories, this will usually be your own GitHub username.CIRCLE_BRANCH: The branch that contains the latest docs changes that will be deployed. Usually, "master".
Once you have this information, you can go ahead and run the publish-gh-pages script like so (making sure to insert your own values inside the <placeholders>):
GIT_USER=<GIT_USER> CIRCLE_PROJECT_USERNAME=<CIRCLE_PROJECT_REPONAME> CIRCLE_PROJECT_REPONAME=<CIRCLE_PROJECT_USERNAME> CIRCLE_BRANCH=master yarn run publish-gh-pages
You should now be able to load your website by visiting its GitHub Pages URL, which should be something along the lines of https://CIRCLE_PROJECT_USERNAME.github.io/CIRCLE_PROJECT_REPONAME. For example, Docusaurus's own GitHub Pages URL is https://facebookexperimental.github.io/docusaurus, because it is served from the gh-pages branch of the https://github.com/facebookexperimental/docusaurus GitHub repo. We highly encourage reading through the GitHub Pages documentation to learn more about how this hosting solution works.
You can run the command above any time you update the docs and wish to deploy the changes to your site. That's usually fine for sites where the documentation rarely changes, where it's not too much of an inconvenience to remember to manually deploy changes. Now, if you're wondering if this process can be automated in any way, keep reading...
Automating Deployments Using Continuous Integration #
Continuous integration services are typically used to perform routine tasks whenever new commits are checked in to source control. These tasks can be any combination of running unit tests and integration tests, automating builds, publishing packages to NPM, and yes, deploying changes to your website. All you need to do to automate deployment of your website is to invoke the publish-gh-pages script whenever your docs get updated. In the following section we'll be covering how to do just that using Circle CI, a popular continuous integration service provider.
Using Circle CI #
If you're already using Circle CI for your project, all you need to do to enable automatic deployments is to configure Circle to run the publish-gh-pages script as part of the deployment step.
- Go to https://github.com/settings/tokens and generate a new token, granting it full control of private repositories through the
repo access scope. Store this token in a safe place, making sure to not share it with anyone. This token can be used to authenticate GitHub actions on your behalf in place of your GitHub password. - Open your Circle CI dashboard, and navigate to the Settings page for your repository, then select "Environment variables". The URL looks like https://circleci.com/gh/facebookexperimental/docusaurus/edit#env-vars, where "facebookexperimental/docusaurus" should be replaced with your own GitHub user/repo.
- Create a new environment variable named "GITHUB_TOKEN", using your newly generated access token as the value.
Open your circle.yml file and add the following under the machine: section to tell Circle to use relatively recent versions of node and npm, replacing npm with yarn if applicable:
machine:
+node:
+ version: 6.11.2
+npm:
+ version: 3.10.10
Then, add the following lines to the deployment: section. If you don't have a deployment: section, you can add it at the end of the file.
deployment:
+website:
+ branch: master
+ commands:
+ - git config --global user.email "<GITHUB_USERNAME>@users.noreply.github.com"
+ - git config --global user.name "<YOUR_NAME>"
+ - echo "machine github.com login <GITHUB_USERNAME> password $GITHUB_TOKEN" > ~/.netrc
+ - cd website && npm install && GIT_USER=<GITHUB_USERNAME> npm run publish-gh-pages
Make sure to replace <GITHUB_USERNAME> with your actual GitHub username. DO NOT place the actual value of $GITHUB_TOKEN in circle.yml. We already configured that as an environment variable back in Step 3. Since the script will run within the Circle environment, the values of CIRCLE_PROJECT_USERNAME, CIRCLE_PROJECT_REPONAME, and CIRCLE_BRANCH are already defined as environment variables and will be picked up by the script automatically.
Now, whenever a new commit lands in master, Circle will run your suite of tests and, if everything passes, your website will be deployed via the publish-gh-pages script.
